Saturday, February 13, 2016

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Adapted Screenplay

Brooklyn, written by Nick Hornby and starring Saoirse Ronan, is among the nominees this year for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Welcome to Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the
Oscars, our daily look at this year’s Academy Awards race. Be sure to check
back every day this month for analysis of each of the Academy’s 24 categories.

Best Adapted Screenplay

The Writers Guild of America Awards will take place this
evening to honor the writers in a host of different screenwriting categories
for television and film. Unlike the Directors, Producers, Screen Actors guilds,
the Writers Guild is not a great indicator for the Oscars. Its eligibility
rules require writers be guild signatories to be considered even for a
nomination. Foreign films, some independent films, and writers who just do not
want to sign are excluded.

People like Quentin Tarantino, a two-time Oscar winner, are
never nominated here because they are not guild signatories. Last year’s Best
Original Screenplay winners, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Armando Bo, Nicolás
Giacabone, and Alexander Dinelaris for Birdman,
were not cited at the Writers Guild. Across its original adapted screenplay
categories, over the last five years, six guild winners have gone on to win a
screenwriting Oscar, a 60 percent hit rate that tells us very little. All that
being said, if anything other than The
Big Short wins tonight or at the Oscars, it would be shocking.

The Big Short – There are four Best Picture nominees nominated
for Best Adapted Screenplay, plus a film the Academy clearly loved in giving it
six Oscar nominations, but only The Big
Short is among the frontrunners for the top award. A large part of the
reason is the film’s unique voice, crafted by co-writers Adam McKay and Charles
Randolph, both first-time nominees, and adapted from the book by Michael Lewis.

This is a great film, but it did not fully work for me
because of that voice. To me, it is too snarky and takes it subject matter too
lightly. Listening to McKay and Randolph speak and reading interviews with
them, it is clear they do not take this lightly. Both men are genuinely angry
and concerned with the way the U.S. economy has functioned to benefit the
wealthy at the expense of everyone else. If you are asking me, that concern
only loosely translates to the screen. Though the writers may be sincere, their
film is anything but.

However, those are my problems with the material, and I am
in the minority, particularly as concerns industry voters. The other side of
the coin – the side that makes this a deserving winner – is despite its snark, The Big Short is a witty, structurally
complex script that takes incredibly dense material and makes it palatable for
viewers who otherwise might never learn a thing about the financial crisis. It
is absolutely must-see viewing for anyone troubled by the direction of the
nation.

The Martian – Drew Goddard has made his career mostly writing
smart, highly self-conscious material for television shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Alias, and Lost and films such as The
Cabin in the Woods and World War Z.
The Martian is a stark departure from
that work in that it is completely unself-conscious. The script embraces its
genre without winking at the audience and tells a straightforward tale about
rescue and survival that is universal in its emotions but specific in its circumstances.

Working from a densely scientific novel by Andy Weir, Goddard
makes the correct assumption that his audience is smart and does not dumb down
the material. Viewers never get lost in the minutiae of the science because
Goddard – and Weir – give the story a strong emotional through-line. The basic
story is one of a castaway, which in and of itself is instantly enthralling,
but the screenplay also adds in layers about the importance of science,
teamwork, and problem-solving that frankly too few films consider.

Room – Somewhat remarkably, Emma Donoghue is the first woman
ever nominated for adapting her own novel. The statistic is somewhat
meaningless in its specificity – for instance, Lucy Alibar was nominated with
co-writer Benh Zeitlin for adapting her play Juicy and Delicious into the film Beasts of the Southern Wild in 2012 – but it is still telling in
some ways. It obviously has never been a conscious decision by the writers to
exclude women who adapt their own novels, but the phenomenon speaks to a larger
issue about diversity, representation, and the kind of stories that get told in
Hollywood.

Whatever it means, the writers have chosen a fabulously
accomplished screenplay to be first. Donoghue’s writing is subtle, stirring, and
brilliantly attuned to the emotional states of the characters. On first watch,
it may not seem to be that complex of a film – a young woman and her son escape
from the man who has held them prisoner for years and adjust to their newfound
freedom. However, juggling the inner lives of Joy (Brie Larson), Jack (Jacob
Tremblay), their captor (Sean Bridgers), and their family (Joan Allen and William
H. Macy) is as deft a feat of writing as you will see this year.

Brooklyn – Nick Hornby, who previously was nominated for
adapting the memoir An Education, has
been a successful author for years and is well known and well liked in writing
circles. Though his most popular novels have been focused primarily on lost,
man-child-type main characters (About a
Boy, High Fidelity, Fever Pitch), he has carved out an
interesting niche in Hollywood as a writer of insightful stories about strong
women – the aforementioned An Education,
last year’s Wild, and now Brooklyn.

Based on the novel by Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn is a simple story about in Irish immigrant in 1950s
America, but it is told with such grace and intelligence as to be almost
revolutionary. We watch as Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) is slowly introduced to a
world of possibilities she had never known, and that burgeoning awareness is
magical. Though the story’s actual stakes are low – particularly compared to
the other nominees in this category – the emotional stakes for the characters
could not be higher, and by that, we are drawn into caring.

Carol – This is Phyllis Nagy’s first feature screenwriting
credit, though she did write and direct the television movie Mrs. Harris. For her first feature, Nagy
chose the defiantly strange and deeply passionate Patricia Highsmith novel The Price of Salt. Thankfully, in the
translation from the page to the screen, she loses none of the strangeness or
passion that drive the story of two women who fall in love but are kept apart
only by prevailing social norms.

Nagy’s script drips with pain and longing in ways that we so
rarely see brought to life on screen. Portraying repression in a ‘50s setting
is nothing new, but the way the script explores what it is like to be a
liberated person in repressive times is beautiful and tragic. These women,
Carol (Cate Blanchett) and Therese (Rooney Mara), know what they want and grasp
at it but cannot take hold. The script portrays their closeness, even when they
are separated, with the kind of despair less daring romantic dramas would never
show. It is honest and heartbreaking.

The final analysis

This is The Big Short’s
award to lose. It is one of three or four Best Picture frontrunners, none of
the others of which are nominated in this category. It is a sterling
achievement of screenwriting and will be a deserving winner. If it loses, that
will be our first indication The Big
Short will not be winning Best Picture. If it wins, the race to the top
will remain close to the end.